Hosoi

by Christian Hosoi

  When he asks yet again, I say, “Okay, whatever.” At his command I raise my hands. He pulls up my shirt and rips out the hip sack, holding it up like a trophy. “Oh, look what we found,” he says cheerfully. He reads me my rights.

  Now I really am busted, but I won’t do much time. People do only six years for murder, four for manslaughter. I’ve got no felonies on my record, so I’ll probably get probation and be on the streets again in months. Even if I do get a long sentence, I’ll never rat on anybody. You do the crime, you do the time, right?

  All of a sudden, the cops turn our friendly little get-together into an interrogation. One says, “Christian, tell us where you’re taking the meth.” I don’t answer, of course. Next thing you know, the agent will be shining a light in my face and slapping me around, if they remain true to the movies.

  When they ask again where I’m taking the drugs, I roll my eyes and answer, “Hawaiian Brian’s,” which is a pool hall in downtown Waikiki.

  “Really, who you taking it to?”

  “Brian.”

  They want a story, so I give them one. Of course the officer knows I’m lying, so he says, “Christian, if the guys you’re going to meet were in your shoes, they’d turn you in.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answer. I’m thinking that if somebody turned me in, he’d have some serious problems.

  It’s like the cop knows what I’m thinking. He says, “Christian, 98 percent of people who turn someone in don’t suffer any retaliation.”

  “Well, I fit into that 2 percent. Maybe they don’t do it that way in Hawaii, but that’s how we do it where I’m from, in L.A.”

  “Christian, that’s the movies. We know you’re not the guy behind all this; we know you’re just a mule. Tell us where you’re taking the drugs and instead of ten years, you’ll do two.”

  Talk about the movies—he’s the one doing the Academy Award–worthy acting job. I’m not gonna do two years to turn somebody in. I’m not doing two years anyway, so why should I buy his story?

  All along I’m picturing the guy I’m taking the meth to. He’s a nice family man with children, and he doesn’t even use drugs. He’s not like me, an addict cruising around from drug house to drug house, from craziness to more craziness. I mean, I’ve been there blowing torches with parents while their babies cry for them in back rooms. I’ve seen guys turn blue after taking a big hit. I’ve seen guys OD from taking one hit too many, and guys that look like they’re gonna die if they don’t get another hit quickly. But I’m not going to turn in my connection; that would go against everything I stand for. I’d kill myself before I ever did anything like that.

  Some of the plainclothes guys leave and two DEA agents walk in. The one who’s apparently supposed to be “good cop” says, “Look, we know where you’re going. Why not just be honest with us so you can get less time?” Somehow they know all about my plans, it turns out. It didn’t occur to me then, but six months later I figure out that I was set up. Again I reply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to Hawaiian Brian’s to meet Brian.”

  “Bad cop” leans over and says to me, “This is your last chance, Christian: tell us where you’re taking the drugs.” When I sarcastically reply, “That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it,” he cuffs me, marches me back out to the curb, and stuffs me in the backseat of an unmarked car.

  All I can think is that I need to call my girl so she can get ahold of my dealer, so he can get me a lawyer. Obviously, when you do time for somebody, that person is going to take good care of you and your family, right? I’ll have my rent paid probably, get money on my books, get a good lawyer, and get probation, or at least the best time possible. No big deal.

  In the car, the detective comes on like a high-pressure used-car salesman. The problem is he’s got nothing I want to drive home in. “This is the last time,” he says urgently, pointing his finger at my chest. “If you don’t talk to us now, you’re going to do all ten years.” I’m thinking, Okay—whatever, Danno; talk all you want, but I’m not telling you anything.

  They take me to Honolulu’s police headquarters and put me in a cell with just a bed—no sheets, nothing. I’ve been sitting there for hours when suddenly someone strolls in and slaps down a tray with a bologna sandwich, a cup of Kool-Aid, and an apple. He snaps, “Here’s your lunch.” I used to dine at the best restaurants and buy dinner for half a dozen friends almost every day of the week. But all that seems like a lifetime ago as I eat alone and quietly. I eat everything and sip the Kool-Aid slowly, hoping that if I keep busy, I’ll also keep my mind occupied. It’s not working.

  The next day they take me to Oahu Community Correctional Center, OCCC. It’s an old jail and they process me really slowly—you know, Hawaiian style. They issue me green jail clothes with black slippers and process me through, the iron door slamming behind me. All the while the news stations are broadcasting, “Professional skateboarder Christian Hosoi was arrested at Honolulu International Airport for interstate trafficking of narcotics.” Both my mom and my dad hear about me from family members who’ve been watching the news. It tears them to pieces.

  When I arrive at the holding tank, all these guys are stoked, almost cheering like I’m at a skate demo. Someone says, “Christian Hosoi, no way! We saw you on the news last night. You’re my idol.” I’m sure I’d be signing autographs if the guards would allow it. I’m thirty-two years old and these kids are like nineteen, maybe in their early twenties, and some of them are facing life in prison. When I ask what they’re in for, it’s all major crimes like murder. I don’t want to kill anyone; I just want to get high. What am I doing here?

  One of the older guys says he once saw me skate and used to own one of my boards. He seems friendly enough so I ask him, “What are you here for?” “Oh, murder,” he says, casually. When he asks what I’m in for, I tell him about my meth bust, expecting him to say I’ll get a light sentence. Instead, he replies, “Oh, brah, you’re lookin’ at ten years; it’s mandatory.” He says he’s doing double life and will never be going home. “Ten years is a walk in the park—gravy, brah, gravy.”

  All these guys are really casual about spending the rest of their life behind bars. They hang out and play cards and watch TV for hours. Am I the only one who wants out of here?

  I desperately want to head home and forget about all this, but it’s not looking good: after inquiring further, I learn that the detectives and the guy in the holding tank were telling the truth about a probable ten-year sentence. The truth hits me like my own life sentence, or more like a death sentence. This can’t be happening to me. But I get assigned a cell and settle in, left to myself in the quiet, and eventually the full weight of my situation hits me: I’m in to stay.

  Three days after my arrest I appear before a judge, and the DA convinces him that I’m a danger to the community and a flight risk. There’s no bail granted. I don’t think I’m a danger to anyone but myself, but I’m certainly a flight risk; and if I fly, they’re never gonna find me.

  Every other day we’re given ten minutes to talk on the phone. If you call someone and there’s no answer, you can’t call back for two more days. I ring Jennifer, my girlfriend, who was staying in Hawaii, but she doesn’t answer. Because I have nothing to do, time crawls by. Back on my bunk I think of some questionable people I know on the outside. Why am I here and they’re not? I’m a good person, but they beat people up, shoot people, rob people—and they’re still on the street. One good thing is that for the first time in my adult life I’m not doing drugs.

  JENNIFER AND ME. HOSOI FAMILY COLLECTION.

  Within three days I fall into a routine: sleep, walk to chow, eat, get locked down for the night. I start smoking cigarettes, something I’ve always had a strange relationship with. Once, years earlier, I actually tried getting addicted to cigarettes just so I could figure out why so many of my friends enjoyed them. I would also use cigarette ashes on my homemade aluminum-can crack pipe. In jail I sm
oke because we get extra time outside if we light up.

  Amazingly, I don’t have any drug withdrawal problems, but I’ve got lots of time on my hands. It’s not like I’m off to meet my girl, get high, party, or skate. All I think about is how to escape.

  Each day we’re marched outside to the rec area and I look up at the razor wire on top of the fence, wondering how I can break out of here. If I get over the fence, maybe I can run and never be found. If I manage it, will I ever skateboard again? I’m on an island, after all—where will I go? I can probably climb the wall, push the razor wire aside, and jump to the ground. But once on the street, what will I do? Will I take off my uniform and cruise around in boxers? It’s Hawaii and residents don’t always wear a lot of clothes, so it might not seem that strange to anyone. I’ve never been a thief, but sooner or later I’ll have to steal some clothes.

  I mentally rehearse a variety of escape scenarios whenever I’m out in the yard. I think through my escape plan the same way I think through a new skateboard trick. Before I skate up, I rehearse the motions mentally. This will be my most dangerous trick of all, but I believe I can pull it off. I sometimes even start the process of escape: act like I’m going to do it, but not follow through yet. All my life I’ve forged my own way, cut an uncharted path, and arrived at a place everyone said was unreachable. I’ve made a living doing the impossible, and this will be no different. The days and weeks and months pass, though, and before I get a chance to attempt my great leap, I’m transferred to a jail on the mainland.

  But I’m getting way, way ahead of myself. Still in Hawaii, after a few days at OCCC, I finally get through to Jennifer on the phone. Turns out she’s been trying desperately to reach me too—by now I’m way overdue getting home—but of course I no longer have my cell phone. Now that we’re finally connected she’s crying, and I’m trying not to cry because there are a bunch of killers surrounding me.

  After filling her in on everything, I inform her that I’m looking at ten years. “I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” I conclude, my voice breaking.

  That stops her. She says, “I love you, and we’ll get through this. We’ve just got to trust in God.”

  I doubt even God can get me out of this one, so I reply, “What’s God gonna do for me? I need a lawyer, babe!”

  FIRST EVER PUBLISHED PHOTO OF ME, IN SKATEBOARDER MAGAZINE. TAKEN IN 1979. PUBLISHED IN JUNE 1980. © TED TERREBONNE.

  “My dad sets the carved wooden box on the kitchen table, opens it, pinches a large amount of weed, breaks it up with his fingers, and sets the leaf fragments on the table. Next he takes a rolling paper from the box and lays it on the table, next to the weed. Scooping the weed into his palm again, he sprinkles it onto the paper strip, saying something about not making the joint pregnant as he evens out a bulge. This makes my best friend Aaron Murray and me laugh. “Be sure to roll everything up tightly,” my dad adds, rolling the joint and licking the edge of the paper before pressing the thin cigarette firmly between his fingers. “That’s how you roll a joint,” he concludes proudly, lighting it, taking a big hit, and passing it to me. I take a hit, cough, and pass the joint on to Aaron, who also takes a hit and coughs. We smoke the joint down to ash, and by then we’re really high and I’m laughing so hard it’s ridiculous. Aaron and I are eight years old, and from then on we roll our own joints and get high all the time.”

  Don’t be too rough on my dad. He doesn’t think like anyone you’ve ever met. He reasons differently: he used to say that I was a hyper kid and that pot settled me down. Even now, after all those years, he defends his weed solution for hyperactivity, saying it was better than what they prescribe now, Ritalin. I’m not sure about that one, but believe it or not, he and my mom have taught me some great values, mostly by example. From them I learned loyalty, honesty, not to steal or cheat, and always to try my best. They’ve always told me that I can accomplish nearly anything I put my mind to if I give it my best shot. And I always do give it my best shot, no matter what the odds. I don’t blame anyone but myself when I fall, but I have to thank my parents for the rise.

  THE BEST DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY EVER

  Everyone calls him Pops, and everyone I know knows him. Take a look at those old films of me skating against Tony Hawk and you’ll spot him—that Hawaiian-looking Japanese man at the edge of the pool, probably holding a camera. He was one of the few parents there to watch his kid skate. He was there for me when I was winning, but also later, when I lost everything. I’m an only child, and he gave all of himself to me. He was so cool that every kid I knew wished he was their dad. But there was nothing normal, traditional, or patterned in the way he raised me—or should I say, in the way he let me raise myself. From the beginning our lives were over the top.

  When I’m eighteen months old, we all live in an apartment in the Bay Area. My parents leave me alone for a moment and I half-crawl and half-walk out a window and onto the roof of the apartment. When he hears a woman scream that there’s a baby on the ledge, Pops runs out to get me. By the time he arrives I’m looking over the edge. He coaxes me into crawling over to him and then he grabs me by the arm and lifts me to safety. Apparently I smile the entire time as he carries me back into the house. I don’t recommend anyone trying it, but hanging from a steep ledge must be good training for blasting high airs. Maybe that’s why I’m never fearful skateboarding.

  I have another advantage as a skater: I’m skating before I can even walk. I’m just a newborn when our family friend Jim Ganzer brings a skateboard by our house in Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood. He and Pops roll me over the kitchen floor on that board, holding on to my hands.

  I can’t tell you exactly what my first skateboard was, because that memory is buried in my childhood, like another kid’s recollection of his first rocking horse. Pops says I was around five years old when a friend sent us a set of the new urethane wheels by Cadillac and a pair of Chicago trucks—the metal mechanisms that a board sits on and that wheels ride under.

  Hawaiian surfing legend Gerry Lopez was my idol at the time. I once saw a surf movie with Pops where it looked like the entire ocean was falling down around Lopez at Pipeline, and he was standing in the barrel as casually as if he was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change. In the movie, he rode a red board with a silver lightning bolt. Pops makes me a fiberglass skateboard, a miniature version of Lopez’s surfboard, red with a silver lightning bolt. The skateboard has a kicked-up nose like a surfboard and is turned down in the tail—something Pops thinks will work well for braking. I ride the board in reverse, so it works like a kicktail skateboard, something that won’t be invented for another few years.

  I’m no older than six when several cute girls my age run over to my house, giggling in their floral bikinis, asking me to come out and skate. One of them stands guard to make sure there aren’t any cars coming while I bomb the hill, and the rest of them cheer me on as I speed past them. Girls cheering me on while I ride a skateboard—I can almost think that was some sort of premonition of things to come.

  My first store-bought board is a G&S with OJ wheels. I love that board so much I keep it in my room, right next to my bed. One day I’m out playing hide-and-seek and stash that board in the bushes. When I return, it’s gone. That sucks big-time.

  There’s no pro skateboarding yet; I’m just a little kid in search of big heroes. Aside from surfers, my influences aren’t skateboarders, but musicians and martial artists. I want to be Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and blast out those big power chords of his. The only thing I want more than that is to be martial arts legend Bruce Lee. At an age when other kids are reading comic books, I have everything in Bruce Lee’s books underlined and even memorized. I take his sayings to heart—things like, “Be water, fast and fluid.” Since I can’t actually be Bruce Lee, I want to beat him and every other martial artist in the world, someday. My dad practices martial arts, and he drives me to the studio with him, where we do kung fu together.

  Whenever there’s a new kung
fu movie in town, we go to the Mar Vista Theater in Chinatown. We don’t just watch the movies; we absorb every frame in Bruce Lee’s pictures, sometimes watching them two or three times. Bruce Lee isn’t like all the other action movie heroes. He doesn’t tell his opponents what he’s going to do to them; he simply does it. By then it’s too late for them. He’s overwhelmingly fast, powerful, stylish, and confident—and that’s just how I’m going to be.

  BRUCE LEE ON WHEELS

  There aren’t many kids my age skateboarding in my neighborhood, but Aaron, the kid I smoked that first joint with, is one of them. Aaron “Fingers” Murray will become a legendary skateboarder, and one day he’ll own a skateboard company called Koping Killer.

  We’ve always had a lot in common. Like me he’s part Asian, and his parents are really liberal. Both his parents attended Chouinard Art Institute with Pops. Aaron is adventurous and curious and desires to be the best at whatever he does. By the time we begin hanging out, his parents are separated and so are mine. Whenever we’re at one of our dads’ houses, we hang out together all day and long into the night. During the day we skate. At night we tear around the house, leaping over couches and chairs and playing games while our dads jam the blues on guitars and drink Rémy Martin cognac and smoke cigarettes and fat joints that we take hits from.

  I gradually discover that a lot of parents who survived the ’60s carry that experience over as they experiment with unique ways of raising their kids and continue to use drugs. Smoking weed is no big deal to them; they consider it harmless. Such parents are different than most parents today—but even back then, nobody is as different as Pops. He’s radical in his approach to everything, especially raising a child, even for those times.